Who The Hell Is Main Character?

"Ten minutes, Doctor Zavian. That’s all we get before they call us back in," Renner had his back against the crate stack.

A man in his forties, brown skin with black hair and emerald eyes. An unkept beard with a cigarette lit between two fingers.

A mask hund loose around his neck.

Zavian sat on an overturned supply case, eyes shut, and head tipped back against the wall.

"How’s Elena now?" he asked.

"She’ll take time...women are quite sensitive emotionally, and she already suffers from anxiety," Renner replied.

"You’re not going to sleep sitting up again, right?" Renner asked.

"I only slept for five minutes yesterday...place’s very restful, trust me," Zavian replied.

Somewhere across camp, a klaxon started.

*Wim..Wim..Wim..*

It wasn’t a general alert.

Zavian’s eyes opened, he furrowed his brows.

"Isn’t that..." Renner murmured.

"The shelter," Zavian completed for him.

Suddenly, they heard a restless sound of boots hitting on gravel floor. A young soldier, barely past twenties with a helmet slightly too big for him, came to halt skidding around the crate stacks.

"Doctor! We---We need---no, someone’s inside the scrap shelter, the reading just spiked!" he said hurriedly.

"Who’s inside?" Zavian was already moving, reaching for his radiation suit dropped beside him.

"We don’t know, sir!" The soldier said.

"..." Zavian and Renner looked at each other.

Renner caught the shoulders of young soldier and looked him in the eyes.

"There are a hundred and fifty some bodies in that shelter," Renner said.

"Every one of them is what’s left of a failed subject, do you understand what that means?" he growled.

The soldier shook his head.

"It means the experiment that was supposed to make them stronger...cooked them from the inside instead. Their tissue’s still hot, actively decaying, actively emitting, months after death! A minute in that room without a suit, even just a single minute!---"

"Just...a fucking single minute standing near the bodies, can give you enough of a radiation dose to guarantee you’re dead within a week, and that death will not be painless!"

"You’ll vomit till your gut lining stats to fall, your bone marrow stops making blood cells, and you bleed out of places, rot like a rat being decomposed alive!"

"You’re saying someone...slip past the perimeter? An adult in their right mind would never!"

Zavian pulled the suit over his clothes and sealed the collar, as young soldier stared between them.

"Who in their right mind would ignore a massive warning board," Renner murmured, zipping himself in his own suit.

Renner and Zavian were the only doctors who covered for the research time during their night shifts so that others could get an hour of sleep.

Their sleep scheduled had turned their mind slightly foggy, with a constant pain right above their eye sockets that they’ve learned to ignore.

They ran towards the shelter which sat beyond the main military camp, separated from the occupied sections by a stretch of barren ground and a rusted fence.

It had been built quickly, almost as an afterthought, after the first bodies began accumulating.

There were no proper walls around it, only concrete and a single door.

And two soldiers who were supposed to make sure nobody entered were drunk dropped on the mud floor at the far end of the fences.

"The doors are shut?" Zavian murmured, but Renners eyes shifted to the drainage gap that was slightly visible from the side of the crap shelter.

"Someone must’ve crawled through that," he murmured.

"Are you crazy? No one can crawl through that unless they have a body of nine year old child..." Zavian said... and then realized what he had just said.

"Fuck."

"How long?" Renner asked looking at the soldier.

"A-about three minutes," the soldier replied.

"Open the gates," Zavian said.

"Right! The ke-key!!!"

"You...fucking hand me that glock,"

The soldier pulled out a gun from his holster and unlocked it, handing it to Zavian.

Zavian approached the huge metal doors, placed the gun over interlocking of the hanging lock, and pressed the trigger.

*Bang-clank*

The recoil tore apart the metal ring, and they opened the gates in one go.

Zavian locked the gun and tossed it back as taking it inside could make radioactive too, and it wouldn’t be much of use anyways.

A wave of stale air rolled through the entrance.

Bodies were everywhere. Some lay beneath torn sheets, others had been stacked against the concrete walls in crude manner.

They were once soldiers, refugees, who all have been a part of the program. Even their weapons, and dresses that laid bare across the shelter carried enough dose to harm many.

The dosimeter on Zavian’s chest began screaming in beeps as numbers climbed higher.

A tiny sound came from somewhere deep inside. A sob of a child.

Their boots passed between the bodies, some were little more than skeletal remains beneath swollen tissue.

Then...Zavian and Renner stopped near the far end of shelter.

A small figure was crouched beside one of the bodies.

A girl barely the age of nine.

Her hands were wrapped around the arm of a corpse, and her face was buried against the sleeve of a dead body.

"Daddy won’t wake up." The little girl sobbed to her breath.

Zavian stared at her, for one brief second, he forgot about everything.

The girl looked up. Her eyes found the two figures in front of her.

"Are you a doctor?"

"Yes." Zavian answered calmly.

"Can you fix him?"

Zavian’s eyes moved from the girl to the body beneath her hands. He had already known the answer before he looked.

The corpse was swollen beneath the remains of a military uniform, and its skin discolored in patches where the tissue had been broken down.

"No," Zavian said quietly.

"Closer to five now," Renner looked at the girl and then at the instrument. "Five minutes."

Zavian was quiet.

He bent down on one knee, and picked up a Mossberg shotgun lying next to the body of the man.

It had a single last shot in its muzzle on load.

"You can walk out if you want to," he said, but did not look at Renner.

Renner put a hand on his shoulder and gave a slight squeeze.

"..." Renner knew that there was no way to save her. Even best of the medical facilities could not help her from dying a miserable death in the next twenty-four hours.

"Zavian...if there’s a God left in this place, I don’t think He’d forgive us for deciding when a child has suffered enough to deserve death."

Zavian supported the stock on his shoulder and pointed the muzzle at the head of the little girl.

His hands shook violently, and his lungs were starting to grip the air in his throat.

"Then He should have come here before we did."

"Never..." Zavian placed his finger against the trigger.

"Never forgive me, child." He pulled the trigger.

*Bang!*

The sound of wood being slapped resonated throughout the lecture halls.

Marcellus raised his head and looked at the woman who was standing in front of him.

"Already sleeping? The day has yet to being, Mr. Severan," the woman spoke.

His were soggy, and red. But he still looked at her.

Hair white as snow, slight pink flush in the white of her skin, eyes of red ruby, and a stature of a woman in her thirties. Wearing a formal beige suite over long black frock.

"I guess...theories sure are boring," she said.

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